Much has been made of the racist remarks made by the owner of the LA Clippers basketball team. Very little has been made of the fact that his remarks came during a private conversation which he was not aware was being recorded. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, however, has this to say in an editorial for Time magazine:
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.
Excellent and interesting analogy–and editorial. Worth reading.
We Americans are an interesting lot. We care deeply about our privacy, so long as it’s our privacy and not someone else’s. If our neighbor shoots video through our bedroom window and puts it online we’d be incensed and mortified. If some semi-celebrity’s girlfriend records a private conversation and it gets leaked to the media we’re totally fine with it because it catches someone being bad. Never mind that this person has been caught before, publicly being bad. We need a private conversation before we’ll get upset to do something about it.
But answer me this, as honestly as you can? Who of us would like a recording of us at our private worst made public? How many of us have said something incredibly stupid in a heated conversation behind closed doors that could be taken as evidence that we are an irredeemably terrible person? I know I have.
Don’t give me any, “Well, they are celebrities, they shouldn’t expect any real privacy” garbage. Don’t try to tell me it’s okay to record and expose people in this manner because they were doing something wrong. Only answer me this: Would you like it done to you? Would you like someone to pour through your life and pick out the parts they think are interesting/incriminating? Would you like your reputation as a parent, a spouse, a friend, or a community volunteer defined by a fifteen minute conversation that someone else got to pick?
I’m not saying Donald Sterling’s racism is limited to that fifteen minute recording. As Mr. Abdul-Jabbar points out, there was plenty of public evidence before–and no one cared. On the contrary, it appears that the main reason we care so much about Mr. Sterling’s opinions are because they were private. That’s the problem here: not that bad people are getting caught being bad, but that we are so casual about how they were caught. If you are thinking to yourself, “Well, I’ve got nothing to hide, so it wouldn’t bother me,” then you are seriously ignorant of your own life. I dare you to record yourself for 24 hours and send me the tape. Let me comb through it and see if I think you’ve got nothing to hide. (No, please don’t. Just making a point here!)
Think about your life from the standpoint of an enemy. Even if you didn’t say or do anything illegal, we live in a world where legality is the least of our concerns. We’re obsessed with “right thinking”, and if someone violates our private standards we’ll find an extra-legal way to punish them ourselves. We don’t need the legal system to ruin people we decide need to be ruined (though it can certainly be a great tool). We don’t even need a majority of public opinion on our side. We just need enough people behind us to make the pain/pressure sufficient.
Think about your last big argument with your kids, spouse, friend or sibling. Do you honestly believe, had that been recorded and made public, there wouldn’t be enough people out there who would decide that’s who you really are all the time, and that you need to be stopped? You don’t think they couldn’t make your life unbearable? Remember George Zimmerman? Remember the poor, unfortunate couple who were forced out of their home because Spike Lee “outed” the wrong George Zimmerman’s address? Do you think there weren’t already people calling every George Zimmerman in the phonebook and harassing them in the hope they got the right one in there somewhere?
That’s the problem with everything these days. We believe that someone else’s bad behavior justifies our horrible behavior. If we think someone is guilty then we are completely justified in doing whatever we feel like doing to make sure they receive “justice.” But it’s not justice. It’s not even vigilantism. It’s mobocracy of the worst kind. We invade–or allow to be invaded–people’s privacy for an excuse to haul them out in the middle of the night to tar-n-feather them. And we convince ourselves it’s okay because we’re on the right side of history, and they were people who needed to be taught a lesson.
The only constant is change. The “right side” today won’t be the “right side” tomorrow. Someday you may wind up on the receiving end of someone’s righteous enmity. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll wish there were laws against people doing that to people (aka you). The thing is, there are. But if we conveniently set them aside any time it suits our purposes we have no business complaining when we one day find the laws don’t work for us, either.
We didn’t steal the cake, but might just choke on it.